Category: Productivity

A great quote from Stephenson’s “Why I am a Bad Correspondent” -- why writing is hard work requiring long, uninterrupted spans of time:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

Using a timer for writing? I'm not sure if it will boost productivity, but at least you can use it to track yourself and measure your progress.

With the introduction of a $10 countdown timer that one can purchase in any housewares department, we can create our own artificial deadlines that create that sense of urgency for us. By setting the timer for 15 minutes to allow us to complete a task, it seems easy to focus and weed out the unimportant. When I use this technique, I get much more work done and I hear myself telling others, "Call me back in 30 minutes. I'm in the middle of something!" Productivity soars.

Read more at: Open Loops: Boosting Productivity With a Timer

A cool tip I've overlooked until recently. While you're in GCal, press the q key to summon a single field to enter an event. Best of all, GCal understands natural language like "tomorrow at 2PM." Not using Google Calendar? Get it at Google Calendar

Need a fixed-width font for full screen text editors or the like?

Inconsolata is a monospace font, designed for code listings and the like, in print. There are a great many "programmer fonts," designed primarily for use on the screen, but in most cases do not have the attention to detail for high resolution rendering.

Download Inconsolata

When you're typing text into a cell in Excel, hitting Enter takes you to the next cell. To wrap your text in the current cell as you type hit Alt-Enter.

This is a cool service: http://jott.com

You can set up a free account, call and leave a voice mail note, and it will transcribe it and send you an email with your message. Great for hands-free note taking on the road!

Inspired by the excellent Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop article (a must read if you have a cluttered desktop and folder system), I thought I'd share my own computer desktop organizational system. I have four main folders.

• Inbox – All incoming items (downloaded files, temp documents that you’ll throw away immediately, files for email attachments, etc.). Items you save to the 'Inbox' must be things that don’t need to be saved to the long term archive. The 'Inbox' is for things you don’t have a chance to intercept and save into your archive or which will be deleted after use. You'll want to configure you Office software and Web Browser to automatically download files here, instead of the root of 'My Documents' or some other folder.
• Archive -- Directory in your 'Home' directory or 'My Documents' folder with all your long term reference materials. It’s your permanent file cabinet.
• Projects -- Files you access regularly during short term project work, organized into project folders. Mini-projects that take only hours or even minutes such as 'Quarterly Presentation' or 'Performance Review' also merit a project folder if they involve organizing multiple files.
• To File -- This is a special folder in your 'Archive' where you can quickly drag files that are ready for Archiving but you haven't had a chance to organize yet. If you have Google Search or other indexing software for your hard drive, you can dispense with organizing files, and simply search for them when needed. If you go this search route, make sure you give your files meaningful names!

And don't forget the Trash Can / Recycle Bin! Use it as a 'To Toss?' folder -- if you think you don't need it, trash it, and when you empty the trash, empty only files > 30 days old.

For the Power User...

App Switching
Alt+Esc works like Atl+Tab on Windows. Hold the Alt key and press the Escape button. Continue to hold the Alt key and select a program. Release the Alt key to switch to that program.

Capitalize a letter
Hold the letter key until the capitalized letter appears.

Move the cursor in a different direction
The Alt key and roll the trackwheel.

Select a check box
Press the Space key. To clear the check box, press the Space key again.

Move down a screen
Press the Space key

Move up a screen
Press the Shift key + the Space key.

Turn on the backlighting
Press Power button

Turn off the display (saves power)
Press Power button twice

Insert the at sign (@) and periods in an Email field
Press the Space key.